Dr. James B. Couche, M.D.
Talks About Using The Rife Machine

1950s Interview by John Crane and John Marsh.

Transcribed from the original recordings by www.rifevideos.com. Copyright 2011.

(1). Dr. Couche: Dr. James B. Couche, (pronounced Koosh), in England as we were Huguenots (french pronunciation [ygno]).  Kicked out of France and landed in Cornwall. I suppose my father and mother were both born in Cornwall so my wife and I were born in Lew. So I suppose I am actually a cousin Jack, as they would say. I live at 4136 Palmetto Way, San Diego and I have been here since March 1931. And I landed in England with my three children. And my own boy James, some few years after we landed here discovered that when he was in the High school, taking his high school at Point Loma they made a test for tuberculosis, a skin bond pirquet test for tuberculosis and they found that he was positive.

So we had an X-ray taken and we found that he had active tuberculosis in England. And my leaving to come here, three or four years before this was a God send for the sunlight of helping him but he still had tuberculosis. So the sun light hadn’t done anything for him. So fortunately I had a portable machine, of the Rife machine in a portable unit. So I promptly started giving him, I kept him out of school for a year, I gave him the machine everyday and for many months he had it. He took it up to, when he moved away from here, he took it with him and used it and I can tell you that he has passed many examinations through the Navy. He now is a full three striper in the reserve and he has all been pronounced as long as he has passed, time and again, as being absolutely perfect. And that was done with the Rife machine.

Crane: That is certainly wonderful doctor.

(2). Dr. Couche: Yea, yea, so that I think I have got a tremendous amount to be thankful for to Roy Rife. Now being greatly interested in all these things of science because of my medical course at Toronto University I had to take a course, a scientific course as well. In passing my examinations in London I also had to have science. So I have always been fond of looking into scientific phenomenon. And when I was told about this Dr. Rife, Royal Rife and how he had a machine (Rife Ray #3) out at the Scripps Institute annex, twenty-four years ago, I went out to see about it and became very much interested in seeing the cases which he had.

And the thing that brought me into it more quickly than anything was a man who had a cancer of the stomach. He (Dr. Rife) was associated at that time with Dr. Milbank Johnson who was then President of the Los Angeles Medical Society, a very wealthy man, and a very big man in the medical world, the biggest in Los Angeles. And he (Dr. Johnson) had hired this annex for this demonstration over a summer of time, several months (summer of 1934). And in that period of time I saw many things.

The one that impressed me most was a man who staggered into a table just on the vast end of cancer. He was a bag of bones. As he lay on that bed, Dr. Rife and Dr. Milbank Johnson said, “just feel that man’s stomach.” So I put my hand on what was the cavity where his stomach was underneath, it was just a cavity almost he was so thin. Back bone and belly were just about touching each other and I put my hand on his stomach which was one solid hard mass about just what I could cover with my hand, somewhat of the shape of the heart. And it was absolutely solid and I thought to myself nothing can be done for that, however, they gave him a treatment of the Rife frequencies and in the course of time over a period of six weeks to two months, to my astonishment he completely recovered.

And he got so well that he asked permission to go back down to El Central as he had a farm there and he wanted to see about his stock.  Now Dr. Rife said, “ Now you can’t drive a car to El Central cause you haven’t got the strength.”  “Oh”, he says, “Yes I can.”  And he says, “I’ll have a man to do it for me.  Well”, he says, “I could easily do it.”  As a matter of right, he did do it and when he got down to El Central he had a sick cow there and he stayed up all night attending to it and he drove back the next day and then without any rest whatever. So you can imagine how he had recovered.  And then unfortunately, he was desperately hungry. He had six cans of sardines and some other things besides and engorged his liver to such an extent that he died. And they posted him and they found he had had a large abscess of the liver which was almost healed but the engorgement of the food broke it down and he bled to death internally.  Well that was a remarkable thing.

(3). I saw some other cases that were very interesting. So then I got a copy of the machine (Rife Ray #5 or Beam Ray Clinical instrument).  That was a very big thing of wet cells (battery cells).  But this one was now brought into the comforts of the cabinet and I saw demonstrations of that and so I finally bought one of these machines and established it in my office. 

And I had some very remarkable things result from it.  In the course of over twenty years.  Twenty-one, twenty-two years.  Amongst the other things I could tell you, were whilst I was in the seven years I was in the gas company building on the seventh floor, a case was sent to me by a Dr. Burkenstock for treatment for tabesmesenterica (sp?)  that is tuberculosis of the bowels of the belly.  The girl came to me entirely strange, I had never seen her in my life before.  She was a young women of 19 years of age.  I asked her if she was married.  She said yes, she was married two years. She said in that two years she had had two operations.  She showed me the scar from the pubis to the navel which Dr. Burkenstock had opened up and stripped out the tuberculosis hard glands and closed her up.  Well in the course of some months afterwards she developed other glands in the belly and he decided to take those out too.  So he opened her again from the navel to the xiphoid cartilage at the bottom of the sternum and that was five months before I saw her.  She was wrapped in a large pack of absorbent cotton right round her because the wound would not heal as tuberculosis wound is notoriously hard to heal. 

And the oozing of it was so great that she had to have this big pad of cotton around her front covering her whole abdomen to absorb the pus that was constantly flowing.  As he couldn’t stop it and there seemed to be no way to stop it.  And as her bills had been enormous from the hospitals and operations and they still owed $500 he sent her to me to see if I could do anything for her.  Well, I placed her on the table, on my operating table. On exposing the abdomen I found a lump the size of a hen egg sticking up in the right iliac fossa, the right corner of the abdomen.  Well I went to touch it she says, “Oh don’t touch that, don’t touch that, that’s terribly sore.”  “Oh” I says, “Don’t worry.  I’m not going to touch it.  That may be an abscess.  If I was to touch it and handle it I might break it.  So we’ll leave it carefully alone”  I said “alright then sit down on the chair.”  She put on her clothes, she had all her clothes on, she had only exposed her abdomen.  And she sat in her full clothing on her chair in front of my Rife machine which was about a yard away from me.  And I gave her, her first treatment. 

Now the Rife machine had covered a band of frequencies, each frequency having a special germ attached to it.  And I had a list of the frequencies what had been demonstrated by Dr. Rife and Dr. Milbank Johnson and others in their experimental work of what frequency would kill tuberculosis, the virus and what frequency, and the rod for another, colon bacillus for one and the virus for another, pneumonia rod and colon viruses, all the different frequencies for all the different diseases.  Typhoid even cancer, sarcoma, syphilis each one of the different germs had its frequency worked out.  But knowing the frequency for tuberculosis, I turned on the machine.  Now I wasn’t at all sure that I need only use the frequency of tuberculosis so I gave her a frequency of the rest of what I had. Knowing that it couldn’t hurt her and it might be some other frequencies that would be effective as well as auxiliary to the TB.  So I gave her what the machine had at that distance not touching her. 

And after giving her the treatment which occupied about 15 minutes, I said “now then that’s ok.”  Now this was a Wednesday morning, she turned to me and she said, “Well now, doctor, when do I come back for another treatment?”  I said “well, don’t come back for at least 4 days.  Give me time to get a reaction.  So don’t come back before Monday morning, 10:00.  That’ll give me time for a reaction.”  So she said “what do I eat?”  “Well,” I says, “it isn’t food that’ll hurt you” I says. “You can take all the food you want but especially lots of pasteurized milk. Take abundance of it. Because you’re so thin that you need it.  Every bit of it.”  And she says “well do I go to bed?”  I says “well you walked here.”  I said “for your own sake if that thing was to break in your side you would be in a mess wouldn’t you?  So I would suggest that you lie down most of the time.  But, for what you needed to do in the house well get up and do it.  But lie down.” 

So she came back on the following Monday morning on her toes.  She says “well you can punch me where ever you like now, on my side.”  I said “what do you mean?”  “All that soreness is gone.”  “Oh nonsense” I said. “Get on the table.”  Sure enough, on the table, there wasn’t a sign of the lump, swelling.  And I began punching it.  “I don’t mind” she said, “it’s alright.  It’s all gone.  No soreness there at all.”  “Oh” she said.  “I haven’t had my period for over three months.  But two days after I was here my period came on the first time I remember without any pain and it’s on now.” And I might say at this time, that I’ve seen her for many years since and she has never missed a period. And she was 93 pounds in weight when she came to me and she left me after three and a half months treatment she was 127 pounds.  Dr. Burkenstock has told me since in the last year or two that she is now 145 pounds and has never looked back.  Well, that is a startling case because I practically instantly cured her of tuberculosis. And it was a most outstanding condition.

(4). Well, I was going to England at the end of that period of three and one half months, and I went to England and over there introduced the machine to those people over there.  Or told them about the machine and I came back in three and one half months. Well, at the end of the period before I went to England, Dr. Burger and another associate, with Dr. Milbank Johnson, told me that I must be in the medical society.  That my education was such that I ought to be in the medical society and there was no sense in me being out.  And they would sponsor me.  And I laughed.  I said I haven’t the faintest desire to go into the medical society because spiritually and in other ways, we don’t see at all eye to eye and my work is more or less of the charitable type and that doesn’t go with the other fellows here and so they don’t want me in the medical society. 

Well, he said that’s ok, you come to El Cortez hotel at a certain day and we will give you a dinner.  And put you in, propose you to go in the medical society.  Which they did.  And I paid $5 for a journal which I was to get every week being a member of the medical society.  Well, right immediately after I went abroad, got back in 3 ½ months, to find that I had been rejected.  Now I never inquired why I was rejected.  I never even told Burger or Milbank Johnson that I had been rejected.  I wasn’t interested enough to bother.  But I had a pretty good idea about it. It only took two members to blackball a person. As I knew two prominent members in the society who knew me and my machine very intimately ‘cause they were adjoining me and my office in the electric building and they wouldn’t have anything to do with me because of this machine.  So I have a pretty good idea probably who had turned me down but I never inquired nor did I ever tell Burger or Johnson.

(5). Well, I was going to England at the end of that period of three and a half months and I had only got back when there was a patient working in the post office. He was a cripple with his hip but he also had contracted a condition of the mouth, cancrum oris, of all the stinking things that you ever smelled in this world, its cancrum oris.  It had eaten out the front lip three fourths of an inch in extent so that his teeth shone through and the edges of it were raw and stinking.  The man was lying in the hospital in the center of town and so helpless that he couldn’t even raise his hands or move himself.  Everything had to be done for him and of course every doctor in the city at that time almost that were attending in the hospital all came to see him.  And he’d had a variety of all kinds of treatments that hadn’t done him one single bit of good except irritated him and the smell to himself was so great he couldn’t hardly stand it.  It was abominable.  You didn’t have to get into his room before you could smell it.  “Well,” they said to me “well now, doctor,” it was Dr. Raymer, a lady doctor who happened to know me and my machines.

She was in practicing with her sister in the electric building on the floor below me.  She said I was supposed to send for Dr. Couche so they called me up and I had just gotten home on the Saturday and would I mind coming down to see this man.  I says “alright, I’ll come down tomorrow morning, Sunday.”  So I got down to the hospital and found the condition as I have stated.  “Well,” said Dr. Raymer, “Can you do anything for him?”  I says “Well I don’t know.”  I says, “My work is in its infancy yet.” I says “All I can say is bring him down to my office.” And so they brought him down.  He came down to me every single day including Sundays for 17 days.  On the 17th day he was completely healed and well.  He had been gathering his strength up and it wasn’t long before he was out of bed and eventually went back to work at the post office. So that was another case. 

(6). Then I had my brother come over from England in ’47. And he’d had a sinus of 30 years and he had a large hole up in the side of his nose that you could from the inside, you couldn’t see it from the outside, entering into the cheek cavity in the bones of the cheek in the antrum. And every night of his life before he went to bed he used to syringe this thing out with warm water and boric acid to keep it clean.  He had to do that every night before he went to bed.  Well he came over to me and I said, “Well”, now his name was Vivian.  I said, “Well Viv, let’s see if I can do anything for you with the machine.”  So in the meantime I had adopted the habit of using the machine in direct contact on the body on the part.  So I put him on my table and gave him the machine, the Rife machine, for 5 weeks.  Every day for 5 weeks. He was with me 6 weeks altogether.  And I could give it to him every day because he lived with me. 

So every day I put him on the table and gave him a treatment with the machine. At the end of 5 weeks, he remarked, he says, “you know Jim,” he says, “I’m not getting anything out of that thing any more.  Is that alright?”  I says, “isn’t that what you wanted? You asked me to heal it.”  I says “it’s been healed apparently. There’s no more discharge.”  Now it’s very remarkable because I remember 30 years before in England his having those operations. He’d had three operations on the sinus and they’d operated from the inside of the nose.  So that was another remarkable case.

(7). And I have found that there are many things I could cure.  I could cure arthritis and I could cure tuberculosis of other parts of the body.  I had four cases in my records of people who had lost one kidney and unfortunately had germs in the bladder flowing from the other kidney which of course would have been fatal.  I had one woman come to me about 20 years ago who came to me with a kidney out and we found in the analysis of the urine that there was tubercular germs in the bladder still which of course doomed her to a very short life.  Well, I gave a treatment with the machine and cured her.  And for many long years and she may still be in the county hospital for all I know.  I haven’t seen her for some years.  I did see her sometimes afterwards for a while but I lost track of her.  And what became of her now but I will guarantee to say that she was at least there for 10 years to my absolute knowledge.  And that was one case and I had three others of the same type that had a kidney out. And were healed by the machine. 

Crane: They were tuberculosis, Doctor?

8. Dr. Couche: Tuberculosis, yes.  Then I had another child who had tuberculous osteomyelitis of the leg.  A boy of nine years of age.  A Mexican who was treated at the Mercy Hospital by his attending doctors who used to scrape the bone twice a week to the agonizing of the child who used to scream his head off because they never gave him anything.  They just poked in there and cleaned him out twice a week.  And the terror of that boy was awful.  The dread of this terrible work and he had a big splint on and he was on crutches.  So having treated the rest of his family who’d had tuberculosis they asked me would I take care of him. 

I should have said for the girl that I cured of the belly I never got one penny in compensation.  I never asked her for any because I knew her husband had still 5 thousand expenses to pay and I couldn’t see how I could possibly burden them any further and so I never got one penny for that or the fellow that had the lip.  Or in fact many of these cases I treated because they were up against it and had such a lot of expenses it was hopeless to put any more on them. In fact I have sometimes had to give them money. 

Well this boy came to me and I put him on the table.  It was a hard job to get him in the office.  They had to carry him in.  He struggled his head off. He’d had such an awful lot of doctors, he was scared stiff that I was going to poke on him and he began yelling and I said, “Well, don’t try to keep him from crying because people won’t like it in the building around here because.” And I said, “Sonny, I’m not going to hurt you.  You won’t even feel it.”  I said, “Look at me.  I am putting it on my own hand and watch me.   See?  It isn’t hurting me.”  I says, “I’ve had hundreds of treatments. It won’t hurt you.  So just lie there.  I don’t care whether you take the bands off.  Leave them as is because you’ve got to go back to the hospital and report or else you’ll get in trouble.”  So, we left him as was with the splint on.  Well, I was only less than two weeks treating that boy before the wound was completely healed and well and he took off his splints and he threw his splints away and he’s a great big grown up man now and working his head off. A big strong powerful man and never had any come back of his tuberculosis. He was completely cured. Never of course cost him any money as his family were only poor Mexicans.  And there were many cases like that. 

(9). I will always feel that sinuses I was very expert at. I never treated a sinus that I didn’t cure. And I was very good also on growths, reducing growths.  But I saw hundreds of people. I got to the place that I never kept any records because there wasn’t any use in keeping records.  The patients themselves were the record. I have a lot of records of the beginning but I soon got over putting all the details down because I found that they were walking records.  They didn’t need anything else. Knowing the hostility of the medical professions when I first started I had forms printed that guaranteed that any treatment they received would be at their own risk and that my knowledge was that there was no harm in the rays. They were not virulent rays like x-ray nor did they have any deleterious effect.  That I had had many treatments myself and as a matter of fact in the course of twenty-two or three years I must have had many thousands of treatments.  All day long treating one after another and so on.  My fees were always a dollar or two dollars.  And very rarely three dollars a treatment.  So nobody was ever hurt by the cost of them and they paid cash at the time and that kept me from sending books. In fact, I have never sent more than a dozen statements in my twenty-two years of medical practice here.  So that was the way I ran my work.  They paid cash and if they didn’t pay they didn’t pay.  And that’s all there was to it. 

(10). Now, I used to have some remarkable results with eyes especially pterygium. That’s a growth that comes out towards the pupil and I had many of those that I cured. 

Crane: That’s with the machine, Doctor?

Dr. Couche: With the Rife machine, yes. 

Crane: Is that considered a form of cancer?

Dr. Couche: No.  No, it’s just an outgrowth. Evidently it was a germ.  You asked me what germ it was.  I don’t know.  I simply gave them all I had.  And whatever the frequency was running on each frequency why those frequencies that knocked it out but which it was I don’t know. 

(11). I could reduce tumors though.  I had many illustrations of where I had good effects on treating fibroids.

Crane: Fibroid cancers?

Dr. Couche: No.  No, fibrous neoplasm.  Innocent tumors.  Not malignant.

Crane: What range did you use for those?

Dr. Couche: Not knowing what frequency it was at the bottom of it, I gave them all I had.  All the frequencies. 

(12). I had one remarkable instance of the efficacy of the machine in Rife’s laboratory.  He had a group of people there and his laboratory was a wonderful place.  It cost some $25,000. I believe Mrs. Bridges gave it to him.  There was 15 inches of concrete on the floor so as to stop any earthquake shocks from interfering with his work. And in his laboratory up on the ground floor he had a microscope with a slide on it that this group of people and myself looked at.  And this was not stained so there was no killing of any bacteria on it.  It was just a fresh culture of colon bacillus which is a motile germ having flagella at either end.  It is active.  Very few germs are motile.  They are always immobile like tuberculosis.  But typhoid and colon (bacillus)were both related to each other, have flagella. In the case of typhoid, they were all around the germ and in the case of colon on the ends.  These flagella push it around in the fluid and they are active, very active.  Well on this slide was this culture of colon bacillus.

Well we all went down on the stairs into the cellar right immediately under the microscope that was on the floor above us.  And the Rife machine was down underneath there, under the culture in the cellar on the floor above and we were in the cellar underneath I suppose 10 feet away – 8 or 10 feet away – and he turned the machine on and gave it less than a half a minute’s frequency for colon bacillus.  He’d done a lot of work on colon bacillus so he knew exactly what the frequency was that would kill it.  So he didn’t bother about any other frequencies, just colon bacillus and he turned it on full blast with that special frequency.  Then he turned the machine off and we all came upstairs and waited for 10 or 15 minutes and presently he came back to his microscope and he said, well now gentlemen, it was all men, gentlemen he says, come and look at the slide now.  Well, to my astonishment the bacilli had all been killed and they were stacked up on the slide like a log raft jam coming down from the ocean and it covered, the whole field was covered with the dead bodies of the colon bacillus now killed and immotile.

Crane: Well, it was certainly an amazing demonstration.

Dr. Couche: It was a marvelous demonstration.  And that was through the concrete.

13. Crane: Did you have any treatment with skin diseases?

Dr. Couche: Yes, I have had some very good results with skin diseases.  I had many things like lupus.  I had a case of lupus.

Crane: Is that what you call butterfly lupus?

Dr. Couche: That’s right.  The common kind is a butterfly across the nose and cheeks.  And of course, it’s eventually fatal.  It’s a tuberculosis nature.  The germ of lupus is very much like the same germ as tuberculosis. So it definitely is a close cousin of it and one case that I had of typical butterfly condition across the nose and cheeks and the ears, up around the ears was cured.  When everybody thought that it of course was hopeless.  I had one or two cases of lupus which were all succumbed to the machine.  

(14). We had the machine, like patterned to mine, taken down to the Paradise Valley Sanitarium when Dr. Hamer was the superintendent.  Dr. Hamer had been cured of the machine of his sinus.  He was greatly impressed with the treatments that he got curing his sinus.  So he asked permission to have a machine taken and put in the body of the main ward or room of the hospital.  And Dr. Hamer being a superintendent could do that.  And he had a very excellent technician who did his work and specimens were taken every week for analysis by the technician.  I’ve forgotten the man’s name for the moment but he was a very prominent man. 

Well, this machine was put in the midst of a large number of people and treatments were given to the room every day.  Dr. Hamer told me this personally and his assistant, the technician, both of them confirmed it.  He said, Dr. Couche I was astonished.  All those old chronic colitis cases and other things that we had there that were in there for a long time were miraculously cured.  He says I just never saw anything in my life like it.  And when we began cleaning up all these old chronics in the hospital the doctors whose patients they were got very much incensed about it.  And ordered me to have the machine taken out of the building or they wouldn’t send any more patients there. In a sense that was their meal tickets.  Well, Hamer said well I’m not going to take the machine out of here unless I go with it.  Which he did.  He and his technician left the hospital and opened up an office in Chula Vista.  Could have been National City, I think it was National City.  I remember going to his place. It was National City I guess.  And he took the machine to his office. 

Well, he began getting a great many patients and he was getting quite well known and he got very busy.  Well when the medical society got onto it, they notified him that if he didn’t give up the machine he would have to get out of the medical society as it hadn’t been authorized by the AMA.  Well, Hamer had the choice of either running the machine or getting out of the medical society.  Well he thought he might deteriorate his license if he stayed with the machine as it wasn’t orthodoxed by the AMA and he knew he would have a fight on his hands. He didn’t want to face the medical profession that way and jeopardize his own certificate and so he decided to give up the machine.  Of course his practice faded away and he moved up into the hospital up in the upper country somewhere near Lake Tahoe or somewhere up there. Rife knows where it is, I’ve forgotten now.  But they both moved out.  Now that was what he did in that Paradise Valley and Dr. Hamer would be able to testify that.  He is still alive.  He’s up there with his brother in the sanitarium and he undoubtedly would give that testimony if he was asked for it. 

15. Crane: Yeah, have you heard from the Ball Plain Home in regards to tuberculosis?

Dr. Couche: Yes.  I had a very remarkable experience with that.  I used to send and still do, a subscription to the tuberculosis people at Ball Plain and this happened about something over five years ago. I sent them word that I would guarantee to cure any case of tabes mesentarica, that’s tuberculosis of the bowels or bone, and could probably modify any form of tuberculosis at the hospital and I would be very glad indeed to bring a machine to the hospital. And would guarantee the work on, particularly on, tabes or osteomyelitis tuberculosis type and would put up a bond of $1000 to guarantee it.  That was the exact words in my letter.  I never got any reply to my letter nor was I asked to bring the machine there.

Crane: This is John Crane.  I certainly enjoyed your discussion and I appreciate it very much.  Thank you.